Older version of QuickTime cannot be removed

Hello, it’s been one of those weekends.

I have just taken delivery of an iPhone. As you may know this is a useless bit of kit unless you have iTunes installed which in turn requires QuickTime.

In attempting to install iTunes on a computer on which QuickTime was already installed I came across the following problem.

The installation came to a halt with the message…

The older version of QuickTime cannot be removed.
Please contact your technical support group.


In spite of several hours of searching, (including on this forum) I can’t find a solution to this problem.

This appears to be a well known difficulty and in spite of a lot of talk – no really definitive solution.

It would appear that the “Microsoft Windows Installer CleanUp Utility” works but this has now been withdrawn by Microsoft.

I have already removed all traces of QuickTime, Apple, iTunes, Bonjour, using both the Add and Remove facility in Control Panel, by searching within Window Explorer and doing some surgery in the Registry.

It would have been quicker to reformat the HD and reinstall everything. There’s not much valuable data on this computer so that would not be a problem and it might solve the problem noted on the Network part of the forum which I thought I had cleared but it has returned.

Does anyone know of a quick fix? If there are no answers by noon GMT tomorrow (Tuesday 11 Jan) I shall reinstall the operating system and send the bill to Apple

 

You can still get the cleanup utility from Major Geeks here. But, Microsoft did withdraw it because it was known to cause problems. You can also try Autoruns from Microsoft and look for any processes related to Quicktime but you have to be very careful using this tool.

 

Thanks for the response \tgell,

In fact I did achieve some success late last night – or early this morning to be exact.

From…

http://www.oldversion.com/QuickTime.html

I down loaded a very old copy of QuickTime which installed correctly.

I then proceeded to update that by copies that were about four versions newer. This worked until I got to within 3 versions of the most current when I got the same error. However when I clicked OK the install continued to a successful conclusion

Installing the latest version then worked and subsequently iTunes installed correctly as well.

So success – except this computer is still pausing and making typing difficult and programmes load and end very slowly with some applications hanging for perhaps a minute then operating normally. So I will probably reinstall the OS later today and start from scratch. This machine is usually used as a network workstation so there is nothing of any importance stored on it so no backups are necessary.

It should be plain sailing – some hope!